As the Fort Hood families grapple with the attacks on their dead and wounded loved ones, it is a bitter irony that people were murdered in what was supposed to be one of the safest places on earth. As one general said on TV last night, "we don't carry weapons here at Fort Hood except for training exercises because it's our home."
Where can a soldier be safe, if not on at home on base? That may have been the killer's intent -- to strike at the core bonds of trust that hold military families together; to make everyone as distrustful of each other as he apparently was of them. That will fail.
Yes there will be changes to the way we lived before -- more security and likely open displays of weapons on base as deterrent and protection. But also more open discussion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
At least there should be.
In the wake of the massacre there will be a tendency to say one man snapped. That would be wrong. The truth is anyone could have snapped -- and this one sent out warning flares before he did -- so we need to de-stigmatize PTSD and mental health before someone else snaps and more American families suffer.
While it is unfair to expect
an after action report on such a sensitive subject in the
instantaneous news cycle, some immediate questions deserve attention,
such as how does a negative performance review (as alleged here) yield a deployment to a
war zone? At what point does PTSD render a soldier unfit for
deployment? Do we have the mental health regimes we need? Who is
screening the screeners?
Others will say that after the Walter
Reed investigations and needs assessment, we are doing all we can to help
our troops and veterans get the resources they need. That too would be
wrong - we currently have a Senate "hold" blocking passage of S. 1963,
“The Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2009” which
could be helping troops and veterans cope with disability and trauma
-what the American Legion calls "the invisible wounds of war."
Also, we can work faster and smarter to implement the ideas expressed at last week's first-ever DOD-VA Mental Health Summit.
Tragedy will strike again: there is no safe place from the invisible wounds of war. We can't say we weren't warned; but, for the sake of the grieving families, the dead and the wounded, we must be able to say we did all we knew how to stop it.
Follow Christine Pelosi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sfpelosi
All that said, it is also unacceptable to vilify Muslims and Islam because of this fellow. The vast majority of Muslims would not do what Maj Hasan chose to do.
There are as many reasons on this earth why one person snaps under pressure as there are humans. And therein lies the problem - the human tendency to box individuals into categories. It prohibits us from looking at people as individuals with individual needs and limits. By lumping people into convenient boxes we assume all people in those boxes will perform/react to the same stimulus.
Since the military is in the business of training people to kill, why is there any surprise at all that at some point one of those people will reach their personal limit and just break? And if that person has inner turmoil that is ignored by those around him/her it is less of a surprise when it happens. The need to be validated by others is a strong primeval urge in humans; when that need is oppressed nature dictates that the pressure will be released in whatever form is appropriate for a specific individual.
As for who is screening the screeners? My guess is nobody cares as long as their numbers look good.
Is it possible that this guy is just a terrorist? He were not a Muslin or his name was Anglo and had committed these acts, would we have called his acts for what they are?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_killings#United_States
Of the 18 US killings listed since 1983, not one had an Arabic name.
Smith
Brooks
Brownlee
Sherril
Murphy
Taylor
Harris
McIlvane
Barnes
Jasion
Hilburn
Clark
Jennings
Tamayo
Deculit
San Marco
Gallaher
Tartt
How come it's only when a guy named Hasan copies them that this becomes terrorism?
Note this is only a list of USPS workplace rampages. Many more have occurred in other contexts.
It's not the name, it is the action. I'm not politically correct, I'm a realist and I refuse to allow anyone to shut my eyes, muzzle me and vaccum my common sense out my brains. Maybe we are all at fault for the deaths and dreadful acts that the committed. We can't tie people's arms behind the backs and keep them from making decisions that can prevent problems for fer that common sense will hurt race relations. It's not about race, it's the about USA, my home and yours. We're not that bad.
These bombs will be going off for years to come.....Personally when i returned from Viet Nam i would have never , under any circumstance gone back, I heard people threaten to kill if they had to stay an extra day ...... how can we keep sending these troops back into that hell.
Please don't give me the they made the choice to be soldiers crap.
These troops come home to "the world" as we called it , see that the country is just happy daisy to get on without them and then back they go.... totally nuts....
Viet Nam troops were never let back into the states ... they knew they would desert to Canada.
This is a tragedy but,
Is this any big surprise to vets? i doubt it.....
You don't know what his motivations were any more than people who say he did it as a jihad. The facts aren't in.
Oh, apparently, it's surprising to the entire Ft. Hood community it looks like - lots of vets there.
As you should well know, vets do not have one voice - they have many.
I'm with you that guys sent over and over (hell, even just once) to combat zones can be torn up by it, or at the least their lives "back home" wrecked, and I think we are putting too much on too few troops. We either need to reduce the scope of our conflicts or have more people involved in fighting them, imo.
I hope the day comes soon when these wars are over.
The red flag is probably a person's inability to form good human connections. WaPo said he couldn't find a wife who was religous enough and, I bet, we'll find he didn't have many friends. I think, in the end, we'll find that he has more in common with all our other mass murderers than with the wounded warriors he was supposed to have treated.
Should he have been screened better? Maybe. But how much, really, can you screen all soldiers at all times? Not enough information out yet to use this as an example of anything for anybody.
This person, based on what we know, does not represent mentally ill people anymore than he represents muslims, based on his actions. As it is, apparently he was becoming known for his sympathetic views toward what is perceived as our enemy; whether he had those views because he was mentally deficient is not known, I believe.
I think it is far to premature to use this event as an example for anything, until more facts are known. Nevertheless, diligence for the mental health of service members is something we should exercise, I agree.
The fact is, he did NOT have PTSD, and "snapped" due to his ideologies.
We know that this killer had a poor performance evaluation, complained about deployment, and posted online comments about suicide bombers: is that the time to pull him from active duty? Why wasn't that done? What is the standard now used - and in light of the tragedy, what new standard do you recommend?
More screening is good, maybe more monitoring too. But those come with a reduction in personal freedom and that is sad.